2017/04/30

I am biased towards reading German sources and secondarily English sources when it comes to history, military affairs, politics et cetera - simply because I am German. I can read French, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish a little, but it's tiresome and I don't understand most details in such texts.

This means I am somewhat above global average under impression of the phenomenon that pre-war allies or early wartime allies switch sides. Sometimes I do some side blows on Italy for this reason. No German should consider Italy as allied if history was a reliable predictor of the future.

Well, this topic is finally a bit in fashion these days, because (suspected) Russian subversion efforts are perceived as more successful than (perceived, and in part real) Soviet subversion efforts of the Cold War era. The idea that certain countries would not want to honour their article 5 North Atlantic Treaty obligations* has entered the realm of debatable topics.

The practical consequences of this are very messy. Plans would need to be drawn up for collective defence that treat all unreliable allies' armed forces as uncertain luxury.

It gets even worse if one country was under suspicion of switching sides in the event of war, kind of what Italy did in 1914/15. This is a most unreliable case, but also a terrible one. Potentially hostile mobilised armed forces worth 150,000 personnel could not be tolerated in NATO's rear. To properly keep them in check would require more than 150,000 personnel for the entire duration of the conflict - an unacceptable diversion of military strength for a weakened alliance. A coup de main (quick invasion and disarmament, from multiple directions) with or without a later occupation by non-frontline forces would be thinkable**. This would require maybe twice as many forces, but only so for few weeks. It could be a prelude to a counteroffensive to liberate territory occupied by Russia.

To eliminate the armed forces of an ally that's perceived as a threat is a ridiculous idea in our time, and would be highly illegal. Still, I have little doubt it would be considered as a scenario once the clouds darkened enough to make the now still ridiculous idea of a NATO-Russia war reality.

It gets even more messy if one thinks of the potential for subversion inside Russia. Russia is still a multi-ethnic country and could face sponsored insurgencies in many places once its armed forces are busy elsewhere. This could hugely add to the misery caused by a NATO-Russia war.

Another diversion effort against Russia could happen at secondary fronts. The Caucasus region as a whole could descend into war with Georgia taking Abchasia and South Ossetia and Armenia fighting against Azerbaijan again.

I like to think that a conflict between great powers would either be fought through proxies with little direct involvement of the great powers' forces or as a short & quick limited war designed to prevent escalation beyond a region.

Sadly, there's much potential for escalation. An unlikely nuclear escalation isn't the only terrible scenario.

2017/04/27

I do play videogames for recreation, and in this well-defined environment one strain of character became more obvious than anywhere else: Self-restraint. Often times I make use of less than I could to keep a videogame that became easy more interesting. I assume that I tend towards self-restraint, and apply it in much of my life and thinking.

Then there's the intense interest in 'economy of force' and the railing about power fantasies that drive demands for more military spending well beyond what's evidently enough to deter aggression against us.

I'm also frequently outspoken about a distrust in problem solving approaches that mostly involve throwing additional resources at a problem. Finally, there's my aversion against excess safety, such as airspace deconfliction that goes so far that it accepts poorly linked casualties and failures in order to eliminate a tiny quantity of directly linked accidents.

Unlike some others, my kind of self-restraint hasn't led me to a fanatic preference for 'small & lightweight' as the answer to everything, maybe seeing a repelling example of such a bias early on warded me against it.

_ _ _ _ _

Naturally I am convinced that a good dosage of additional self-restraint would greatly benefit our nations, particularly if applied to foreign policy of great powers and to military affairs/spending.

It would be interesting to learn what psychologists would uncover if they were to profile the personalities and groups that coin actual policies or public opinion on military affairs.

Would they find that rather basic motives like greed, playfulness and fear drive the outcomes? What educational and professional background correlates with which preferences and approaches?

In the end, people should understand a very, very important and very, very fundamental truth:

Military power is an expensive means to an end (security). Once that end is achieved any more military power would be a waste of resources, since military power does not yield profit.

We're not fighting wars for arable land in a subsistence economy any more. You cannot really conquer natural resources any more in Europe (or Northern America), that concept has died in its last stand in 1945. The sole exception - Israel's attempt to hold on to occupied territories since 1967 in spite of repeated UN resolutions demanding its withdrawal - is in my opinion bound to fail, and it has already proved to be excessively expensive.

Self-restraint is necessary to stop at the point where peace is maintained or the nation defended. Those who lack this self-restraint will favour more extreme military power and more applications thereof - and may cause more economic damage to their own country and lead to more deaths than all of their country's criminals combined. The most important virtue in regard to military policy is thus self-restraint.

2017/04/24

I watched a music video compilation of 'best' pop songs of the year 2000 recently, and I have to say unlike some early 90's songs the pop songs of 2000 did age rather well. It certainly was a fine summer.

What struck me was a comment on the video, though:

"best thing about this year is that it was before 9/11﻿"

So true.

It's difficult to find anything that changed to the better for Europeans since (save for internet connection speed), but it's very easy to compile a long list of things that turned to the worse. This is due to both the allergic overreaction to 9/11 and the bursting of several economic bubbles in the Western world.

So basically what happened is that the people of the Western world failed to keep what they had; peace, prosperity, calmness, confidence.

The failure wasn't exogenous, it was not some natural disaster. It was man-made, and thus should trigger learning to avoid a repetition under similar circumstances.

There are developed countries with little if any bubbles in their economy for decades, so it's possible to get this under control. The allergic overreaction on the other hand - that's a difficult one. I suppose this requires to elevate the right people into positions of prominence in politics and media.

P.S.: This was originally written in 2016, I just held it back for months. Now I am additionally concerned about what consequences these years will have in the long term. The direction the Western World is heading to may seem promising to some, but I have rather mixed expectations. Another lost decade isn't unlikely. That would be two lost decades for some countries, others had earlier problems and may experience a third lost decade in a row. There's much more potential for the advance of societies.

2017/04/19

Just so foreign readers take notice; there are kinda official rumours about an enlargement of the German military with planning horizon 2032 or so. These rumours follow a change in long term federal budget plans that points at growing military spending. A reorientation towards collective deterrence is obviously the current fashion, though I doubt that this is instead of the great power games like the Mali mission. Judging by the current minister I and what remarks and attitudes have become known I would rather expect the serious collective deterrence thing to be an addition rather than mostly a change of direction. Such a military expansion would also have the ugly side effect that we'd be better equipped for participation in bollocks like the invasion of Iraq in 2003.*

The info is unspecific and not definitive (all of those plans may become meaningless this autumn because of elections) and what few details have been given don't sound particularly realistic (for example way too many artillery battalions planned).

This is no news blog, so I won't write much about these rumours at this early stage.

Those who can read German may want to read the "Augen geradeaus!" blog's posts on the topic if they didn't do so yet:

What matters more in this context is the minister's attitude to such great power games. The minister did not yet learn the lesson that Chancellor Merkel learnt in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and thus should be considered a chickenhawk.

2017/04/18

2017/04/15

I saw a seemingly viral picture claiming that Trump's bombing in Syria pushed his job approval ratings greatly, and the picture claimed that war works.

Well, I didn't jump on this and checked the supposed source and see - no, it didn't work, at least not like that. The job approval rating was not impressed by martial stunts. The people in the U.S. are not THAT stupid.

(The cruise missile strike happened on April 7.
The MOAB stunt happened on the last day of the shown graph only.)

Cui bono – "who benefits" – is the first question an experienced
detective asks when investigating a crime. (...)
The civilian population
in a rebel-held town called Idlib was hit with poison gas. Dozens of civilians,
including children, died a miserable death. Who could do such a thing? The answer was obvious: that terrible dictator,
Bashar al-Assad. Who else?
And so, within a few minutes (literally) the New York Times and a host
of excellent newspapers throughout the West proclaimed without hesitation: Assad
did it!
No need for proof. No investigation. It was just self-evident. Of course Assad.
Within minutes, everybody knew it.

2017/04/14

"In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable."

"I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning."

These are two Eisenhower quotes, and they point at one of the most important things in the conduct of military operations and they preparation for warfare by the officer corps.

It is of great importance to have red teaming (trying to figure pout possible hostile actions) and to understand the terrain, forces and especially the possible routes and their characteristics. It's very useful to calculate in advance whether something may possibly work out well.

This is essential about planning.

What's not essential is the detailed plan, for

"The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon's saying: "I have never had a plan of operations." Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."

That was Moltke the Elder speaking.

I think these insights should guide what to expect from campaigns, how to design staffs from (manoeuvre) battalion to theatre level, doctrine and training of staff officers and COs in general.

The biggest challenge is probably not how to say or write a sufficiently concise order, but how to transfer the insights gained from meticulous planning to the actual leaders.

Imagine officers looking at three possible routes. They learn there's swampy terrain left and right of the road, another route has Central European noise emissions walls left and right and the third one has woodland left and right - visible on a map and seemingly indicating an obstacle there, but actually the woodland allows even heavy lorries to pass. A quick look might have made the 3rd route look worst, when in reality it's the one that's ceteris paribus the best one. That insight is a result of the planning, but how to communicate it best among hundreds of other things is not trivial at all, particularly if there's only 30 minutes for a briefing about 50 different insights.

Planning should also include a coordination of callsigns, map updates, radio frequencies et cetera - things that commanding officers don't necessarily need to know about and thus I suppose they shouldn't be so much part of an order to the CO as simply included in orders directly given to his staff. No CO reads stuff that's not relevant to him when he or she is in a hurry.

I've read doctrines of several countries' land forces on how to do staff work and orders* and I've never seen any such doctrine guided by the insight that planning is important, while plans don't last long and thus don't mean much. Nor have I seen much emphasis on letting manoeuvre forces commanders react to developments quickly and by being on the spot themselves.** It was often written in old (1920's to 1950's) German writings on the subject, but the attitude seems to have shifted hugely after decades of peace in Europe and bombardment of infantry-centric or otherwise low quality Third World ground forces.

There seems to be an exaggerated belief in plans - maybe because real warfare didn't quite challenge this belief. It might do so in the future, though.

2017/04/12

"The possibility that the idiot Trumpkins think they can "solve" [the North Korea issue] makes my blood run cold..."

And my reply grew so long and fundamental that I decided to write it here instead:

I don't think they want to solve anything. Some people aren't in the business of solving problems. They are in the business of rearranging things so they please them.

That's not necessarily a solution, nor necessarily for a better life in objective terms.

More like a cat thinks that this cup really doesn't belong on the table - bam on the floor it is. Trump et al (including many of his voters) may be the kind of people that think governments such as the one in Iran, the one in NK, or the one in Germany for that matter should be treated with a certain attitude and disrespect - kinda like dogs think that tree really needs to have their own smell of piss now.

The idea that everyone is seeking solutions to better life, "to form a more perfect union" or any other strictly objective, measurable improvement. Some people are really not about the end, but all about the means.

I see this in military affairs very often. People dream up fantasy navies and when I ask them to justify the expenses for this or that they have no clue what utility their fantasy navy would offer for all of its increased costs whatsoever. They simply don't require a link between cause and favourable effect - they just prefer the cause by innate preference.

Scientists and science pundits despair over the utter link between proven unsuitability of policy proposals and their longevity. "Zombie economics" etc. Proved to be a horrible idea again and again, still brought up as a proposal if not even as a supposed necessity again and again.

MilPub is one of the very, very few (moderate) pacifistic MilBlogs, so worth a visit.

2017/04/11

After a while of thinking about what Trump did in Syria I gave his team (not him) the benefit of a doubt and came to a possible explanation.

He did not tweet much about the strike, which makes it look a bit deliberate (though deliberation was likely a mere hours long).
He may play the 'crazy, erratic leader' deterrence play that the Kims of North Korea have been playing since the end of the Cold War.

The military strike makes Trump and his staff incalculable for future conflict, and thus creates some deterrence effect in itself. This is, unless it was agreed-on in advance with Putin*; in this case at the very least Putin would not be deterred from anything by the bombing.

I don't think Trump even only understands the concept of deterrence in its variations and details. He would only create 'crazy, erratic leader" deterrence by accident (or rather nature), but someone on his staff may have come up with it through actual thinking (though I don't think it was McMaster).

*: Which by now is a conspiracy theory or rumour only, though somewhat plausible considering the marginal destructiveness of the strike. The use of gas may have been unauthorised by Assad and the bombing an agreed-on scheme to save face and score points with the hawkish U.S. media plus it distracts from ongoing scandals and domestic failures.

I leave this here because every now and then I mention this privately and it's handy to have the stuff compiled in one link:

Military 'barbed wire' isn't barbed wire any more, and hasn't been in decades. It's rather a stamped steel sheet. The exact shapes vary (multiple types can be seen here), but they have in common that

they're much more difficult to cut than actual barbed wire

they're usually stored and applied in coils

sometimes even a single deployed coil can stop a light AFV while 10 coils can be considered a convincing obstacle to all kinds of AFVs*

you rather don't try to jump over it with all of the weight of your individual infantry equipment

nobody likes to handle this stuff, it's a mess even with special gloves and tools

to deploy such obstacles is rather slow

its difficult to cut these obstacles silently, even with appropriate tools

- - - - -

I've heard different claims about how well such obstacles resist explosive charges. My personal guess is that 120 and 125 mm HE-frag shells should be satisfactory at clearing, while small charges such as hand grenades may not be.
A promising clearing method would likely be small continuous rod charges or linear explosive formed penetrator charges (there are linear shaped charges, so I suppose at >110° cone angle linear EFP would work as well, but maybe the linear shaped charges themselves suffice already).** I have never heard of either in service, so I suppose I'm either poorly informed on post-1980's engineer demolitions equipment or nobody really bothered to go much past 1940's solutions in this area.

*: There's a rule of thumb in a German field manual, but I am not sure I memorised it correctly. A standard obstacle would be 3 coils, two on the ground and one on top of them - all linked. Nobody even thinks of trying to jump over or crawl below that without tools.**: Bangalore torpedoes are more bulky, and about 2 kg of bundled or stacked hand grenades seem inefficient and are no good answer to some other obstacles and structures that might be in need of explosive problem solving.

2017/04/08

The evidence for Turkey being a dictatorship since the failed coup d'état attempt has become overwhelming. The evidence is also suggesting that Turkey's economy will crash or stagnate over the next decade (as a whole, not every year) unless the AKP loses power.

Still, we might find ourselves in a position where Europe does NOT stay allied with Turkey (maybe not even with the U.S., for similar reasons), and Turkey instead allies with Russia (autocrats seek comfort by and cooperation with other autocrats when facing democracies).

Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus would not be capable of bearing the deterrence and defence against Turkey on their own, stagnant or not. Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and the still fractured Bosnia Herzegovina would not be huge factors either due to the small size of their economies.

I usually suppose that Poland and Germany should focus on defending the Baltic and Polish frontier of NATO/EU, and will stick to this; Germany should not reorient its military for Balkan/Greek defence, even if Turkey would turn into a threat. We might help with intelligence efforts (I expect many Turks and Kurds to seek asylum from the AKP regime in Germany in the future), but even a worst case Turkey would not be a military problem to the EU on its own. It would be so only if allied with Russia - and German military strength would still be needed in NE Europe if that's the case.

So I see multiple rather self-evident, successive strategies:

Try to tolerate Erdogan's more or less dictatorial rule in NATO

If this fails, try to keep Turkey neutral (if need be by tolerating them doing regional great power nonsense on their own as a bloc-free great power)

If this fails, move on to deter if not defend against Turkey

The geography is most troublesome in this regard. It might be necessary for the UK to permanently garrison Cyprus with relatively strong forces (~ two brigades that fit the terrain) including area air defences and subsidising Cypriotic armed services (focus on wartime strength, not peacetime strength) through the EU might make sense as well. Cyprus is terribly isolated once you don't consider Turkey an ally any more.

It might also be most cost-efficient to subsidise the military budgets of Greece and Bulgaria. This could even be done through forgiving public debt of Greece instead of through direct military subsidies from the EU budget. Such subsidies would only be sensible if the fiscal freedom of action generated thereby would be used well, of course. Huge pay rises for officers, growth in staff sizes, amphibious warfare ships, purchase and operation of obsolete ships as toys and other expenses that contribute nothing to deterrence and defence should not be supported by a direct or indirect subsidy scheme.

Italy might orient its armed services (air force and corps-sized peacetime army) at the Balkans, which means that Central and West Europe would need to suffice for both first week and total reinforcement of the Baltic countries & Poland without support from Italy. This is most relevant regarding the air war, where Italy contributes good area air defences and Typhoon fighters.

Maybe a EU or NATO land combat training centre in Bulgaria with permanent presence of 2 allied brigades (rotation of personnel, maybe a total of 6-8 prepositioned mechanised brigade sets could be present*) would be a cost-efficient and welcome reinforcement.

I suppose a plan to invite the Ukraine and protect it immediately through deployment of (invited) forces worth at least an army corps to the Ukraine might be a geostrategic counterweight plan in case that Turkey turns anti-NATO/pro-Russia. It couldn't be used to deter such an outcome because this would be too escalating, risking an all-out Russian invasion of (all of) the Ukraine.

Armenia and Georgia might want Western protection when stuck between Russia and Turkey, though their involvement in a hot conflict would put them in a terrible place. They might still judge this worth it if they perceive puppet status or annexation by Russia as the alternative.

Turkey's geographical location enables it to cut off both Suez Canal shipping and (together with Egypt) Israel's maritime trade. This would - in case of Turkey as threat to rather than reliable member of NATO - create a case for powerful convoy security capabilities, primarily against air threats.

Cyprus would be an unreliable air base for operations in such a case, so there wouldn't be enough fighter support to secure such convoys, and aircraft carriers would be a terribly expensive means to change this. This creates one of the best cases for dedicated naval AAW. AAW warships like Type 45 (UK, 6 ships), F124 (GER, 3 ships), HORIZON (ITA, 2 ships), F100 (ESP, 5 ships) and FREMM (FRA, 2 AAW version ships planned) would get a critical job after all**, though I suppose their numbers wouldn't suffice to protect more than one convoy per month. The Type 45 destroyers would not all be sent to East Med, particularly not if the British carriers operate in the North Atlantic. The same would be true of the French AAW destroyers.

EH 101 Merlin with Crowsnest AEW radar (UK)

We would also need AEW helicopters to complement whatever AAW sensors and firepower are in such a convoy. AEW aircraft would be too endangered; they couldn't even try an emergency landing/ditching to escape missiles unless one of the extremely expensive (cost inefficient) carriers was part of the convoy.

The land defence topic is much simpler; the terrain doesn't lend itself much to rapid advances of armoured troops and the relatively short land border (only about 200 km depending on where you draw lines) allows for using overwhelming artillery firepower as the backbone of the tactical defence. Islands taken by an aggressor wouldn't need to be taken back; an Istanbul in range of howitzer HE shells would be the bargaining chip of greater value than any Mediterranean island short of (Italian) Sicily. That's not a nice statement, but it's nice that expenses in amphibious warfare capabilities are unnecessary for deterrence & defence.

- - - - -

Maybe you noticed that I didn't count
the USA as a reliable asset in Europe's deterrence and defence here.
That's because under this president it's simply no such thing, and nobody knows
the duration or long term effect of this presidency. I think of the alliance with
the USA not so much as of an alliance with a military power that helps to
deter attack on Europe or to defend Europe as of a treaty that keeps Europe and the USA from becoming adversaries. The USA haven't been
interested in the defence of Europe and are largely irrelevant to it,
with army forces in Europe being of little value and most of the U.S.
armed forces geared towards cruise missile diplomacy and occupation
warfare on distant continents. The USAF would be of much value, but only
after 1-3 weeks of deploying and then 1-3 weeks of intel preparation
& attrition of opposing air defences before air power would take full effect on land warfare.

- - - - -

Anyway; Turkey's armed forces are 2nd rate in equipment and apparently also in skill (at best, and this might have become worse due to political purges), and 1st rate only in size (about 2/3 of Russia's military and paramilitary personnel strength). They would need a thorough modernisation and improvement over 5-10 years to become a threat. To sell them arms that we produce (and thus understand) to avoid them buying Russian (or Chinese, Pakistani) arms might be a good strategy, even though they keep using their land and air forces in questionable ways, particularly against the Kurds.

This would help step 1 and 2

Try to tolerate Erdogan's more or less dictatorial rule in NATO

If
this fails, try to keep Turkey neutral (if need be by tolerating them
doing regional great power nonsense on their own as a bloc-free great
power.

*: Ideally all exercise deployments would be surprise deployments with the troops involved not knowing in advance; this would train the rapid reaction deployment (in 48 hrs, by air into Romania and by road to the depots) in addition to the skill in employing the hardware.

**: I still think that all functions of AAW destroyers could be substituted for by a distributed containerised air defence system based on the container transports that are the convoy themselves; armed merchantmen. AAW destroyers need to beat this alternative in cost efficiency to justify their existence.

***: It is much harder to investigate algorithms in chips than to investigate software code.

2017/04/06

2017/04/05

This may be - in addition to the much smaller market size - be a reason why political satire doesn't prosper as much in Germany these days. Our politics are not only boring by comparison, but also fairly straightforward. One could satirise much of what the greens say, and also apply stale communism jokes on the far left, but other than that there's little but some centrist (SPD) hypocrisy, a couple inevitable government officials missteps and of course the conservative infighting between Bavarians and the rest of the country.

B.S.-wise we lag behind the U.S. by many years, and I won't complain about this.

2017/04/04

I always thought of this slingshot guy as the kind of guy who has fun with stuff that only men seem to have fun with. Quite similar to this fella.

The accusations are obvious B.,S. and more importantly, the very notion that asswipe/errorist activity should keep us from doing things that are otherwise fine is 180° wrong.

Just think about it; the guy in the 2nd video did tests with medieval iron helmets (or rather reproductions thereof made of a most likely better alloy). This B.S. storm could have hit him as well if the stabbed policeman had worn some kind of helmet! Ridiculous.

The biggest relief from the long list of potential enemies with no real ally in sight is that many potential aggressors have no interest in unleashing civil war chaos by breaking the Iranian state, so presumably they won't do it unless their leadership is idiotic or super ignorant *sigh*.

Now, let's group the potential threats:

Air raid threat

U.S. (cruise missile diplomacy)

Israel

Air war and naval blockade threat from the South

Saudi Arabia

UAE

Kuwait

Qatar

Bahrain

Oman

U.S.

Insurrection threat

almost all domestic groups except very devout Shia Persians and beneficiaries of status quo

So far this still served its purpose, though the air war inferiority across the Persian Gulf is no doubt unsatisfactory to the Iranian government. One should also keep in mind that the armed forces of such a state need not only serve legitimate purposes, but are also tasked more or less (varying by agency) with perpetuating the current political system (a theocracy with lots of democratic elements that are limited in their reform ability).

Again; even countries like North Korea, Russia or even Jordan have a simpler security environment!

Well, what would I recommend?

Air raid threat

This cannot really be protected against, for strategic and tactical surprise has to be expected and attackers would likely use the best equipment available to them. To go underground with the most likely targets is very expensive, and rather not feasible for many such targets (particularly the national government).

Air War and naval blockade threat

Iran's most important harbours are deep in the Persian Gulf. It's unrealistic to hope for the ability to export oil from there to world markets with less than about € 20 bn military spending for this air/sea war defence capability alone, and that's before taking into account a possible arms race with Saudi Arabia.

The threat of a protracted air war is a little different. The hostiles' air bases would mostly be in missile range (Iskander etc), so Iran wouldn't need to gain air superiority in the air or buy many expensive air defence systems. It could send an aircraft on a high altitude high speed run to quickly make some synthetic aperture radar imagery from afar, transmit the data to a ground station where officers decide which coordinates to shoot at with accurate missiles within minutes. The small combat aircraft inventories of Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain could be defeated this way. Saudi Arabia's air power is in a different league, of course.

The best defence might be a surprisingly cheap strategy; the less offensive air power potential Iran has, the less motivated the Southern neighbours might be to build up their own air power. This isn't reliable (who knows what the kleptocracies build up their mini air forces for at all?), of course.

A promising route might be to build a respected air defence cluster at Tehran (S-300 and short range SAMs, meant to limit the damage done in an air war), pursue some ballistic PGMs (instead of inaccurate 1980's style "War of the Cities" rockets) and once possible get some 40ish Su-3x fighters or Chinese equivalents* with air combat munitions only (but also SAR and datalink capability).

There's little point in trying to use anything of lesser quality (older SAMs, inaccurate rockets or worse fighters), for it would fail to deter and fail to defend unless procured and operated in uneconomical quantities.

Insurrection threat

The best way to address this threat would no doubt be to treat minorities well, and to ensure loyalty of the armed services (to the government). There is likely a tipping point of damage to the state and insurrection activity that would lead to multiple more groups rising up, so even though or if minor insurgencies may be unavoidable (or couldn't be ended, as in Balochistan) at least that tipping point needs to be avoided.

It makes sense to prefer Shia Persians for key positions in the armed forces, and even for basic training. The less military and paramilitary competence is available to potentially revolting minorities the less likely is their revolt (well, that's what I suppose). Munitions depots need to be guarded and locked up well, and the vast majority of munitions should be stored in territories that would rather not revolt (Shia Persians areas). Certain very reliable units need be positioned at or near Tehran, and be suitable to secure the capital and especially government organs. Western countries need such protection against airborne raids only, but governments such as the Iranian one also need to have domestic revolt in mind.

Low level uprisings should be countered with policing, with military forces in the region but only held in reserve as quick reaction force to back up the police forces. Police can investigate well with the training and equipment required. Intelligence service-like methods of intelligence gathering on (violent) opposition groups and their supporters without link to specific crimes need to be part of the repertoire, but preferably so in separate police units (not the investigating ones). Foreign sponsorship of insurrection or terrorism would need to be detected, investigated, understood, proved, potentially interdicted and then exposed.

Civil War spillover effects

This includes all measures from dealing with the insurrection threat plus no provision of safe harbours (no toleration of recruiting, fundraising, arms purchases) for foreign civil war factions and a lot more military presence. Refugee camps would be operated by the Red Crescent or whatever humanitarian NGO is available to do it, but these camps would need to be policed with proper identity checks and documentation of at least all male refugees. Ideally the camps would be created at some place where public construction projects provide employment opportunity for most adult male refugees. Lots of military-secured road police checkpoints, surveillance between roads by military-reinforced police or border guards and other visible measures would be taken to keep the peace on the Iranian side of the border. Border transgressions by armed forces would be dealt with by making an example on the first occasion; excessive firepower involving artillery fire should communicate a zero tolerance attitude towards armed border transgressions.

Distant scenarios
Back in the Shah's days Russia was kept out by buying large amounts of sophisticated weapon systems (F-14, F-4, F-5, tanks) from the U.S.. This was in part an effort to actually possess a conventional warfare capability and in part a signal of bloc membership; the latter was probably a better deterrent in combination with the ethnic and religious composition that would have made a forced "communist" takeover a worse quagmire than Afghanistan would become after 1979.
Russia might be deterred like this again in the long term, though cooperation (in regard to oil industry, arms purchases and even a real alliance) seems more achievable than getting a Western big brother to deter a schoolyard bully.
Long-term conflict with Turkey could not be deterred this way, for it would more likely than not be about the Kurds. Turkey has made military incursions into Iraq and Syria without those governments' public approval or even against their public disapproval. These incursions were mostly aimed at harming Kurdish separatist forces. The Kurdish successes in Northern Syria and the Kurdish proto-state in Northern Iraq may lead to a declaration of Kurdish independence, which might lead to all out war with Turkey. This might involve Iran with its sizeable Turkish minority in its Northwest, and might so at a scale that would be ill-described with a mere "civil war spillover". I suppose the ability to make a stand at the border with conventional forces would be required to protect Iranian sovereignty in such a case, regardless of how Iran deals with the Kurds itself.

Full scale invasion threat

This cannot be defended against, but it can be deterred. The public of the potential aggressor countries in question could be informed about Iranian ethnic and religious diversity and fracture lines. The risk of causing civil war and breeding ground for extremism that would last for decades should be too great for any invader coalition. This can be reinforced by ensuring that enough Iranians (Shia Persians) are trained as light infantry, and by a promise to open the arms and munitions depots in time to arm the people for a powerful insurgency against any occupation force.

Now, what forces would be advisable?

Border guards with light arms (up to recoilless guns and mortars) and decent equipment for surveillance as well as sufficient border policing skills.

An air force of 40+ Su-3x fighters, hundreds of ballistic PGMs (300-499 km range, warhead effective against hardened aircraft shelter), ground radar stations that could support the Su-3x, 20+ ground attack aircraft for counter insurgency (Su-25) and maybe two regiments of S-300 at Tehran supported by additional low level air defences.

An army of maybe six mechanised brigades and ten small infantry-heavy brigades.

A kind of national guard (not the current Basij or Islamic Revolutionary Guards) that ensures enough males of loyal demographics are equipped and qualified as light infantrymen and NCOs. This would help deter invasion and provide a foundation for a quick expansion of the regular army. These forces would -when mobilised- also allow the regular army to be massed in one region if necessary, taking over its security missions elsewhere.

Furthermore, an alliance either with Russia (in the medium term) or India (in the long term, particularly if Russia doesn't agree) would make much sense. An alliance with Shia-dominated Iraq should be self-evident and might - if approached with great skill and care - even create an open door to the West if and when Western leaders are not too close-minded.
The current Iranian policy of playing protector and supporter for more or less oppressed Shia abroad does more harm than good for Iran, in particular it ensures the hostility of the Persian Gulf kleptocrat states and provides excuses for Israeli and U.S. political hostility.

The old and by now obviously given-up strategy of deterrence though being close to becoming a nuclear power (essentially enriching Uranium more than needed for civilian energy purposes, but less than needed for fission warheads) should not be revived. The Iran nuclear deal framework is a huge success for everyone except the fearmongers and warmongers in the U.S. whose plans it sabotages.

The one thing that Iran needs to guard itself against the most are great power ambitions. Those can only cause trouble given the hardly permissive international environment. Great power ambitions would also be very expensive, and Iran has great need for investment in domestic economic development instead. It is also extremely wasteful to purchase and maintain capabilities that would not be critical to deterrence or defence success, such as old fighters or rather pointless naval forces. Unnecessary offensive systems are an even greater waste of resources, for they provoke additional political hostility and arms racing.

Last but not least; Iran needs to work for a better opinion of it in the Western world, or at least in Europe. Substantial domestic improvements (such as an end to the de facto Apartheid against the Bahá'í minority and some more womens' rights) and no more stupid sabre rattling would create a fertile soil for a ten-year image improvement campaign.

*: That's tricky. The PR China is close friends of Pakistan, and I don't know enough about the international relations between these three to guess whether the PRC would deliver Chengdu J-10B fighters, for example.

2017/04/01

I mentioned air strikes on surface warships a couple times, including when I wrote about the Italian navy and how superfluous naval power is for countering threat surface warships in the Mediterranean Sea.

Back then I also mentioned that while this should be very much possible, I also mentioned that the Italians actually don't seem to be equipped for it. Thus let's look at this in regard to Europe as a whole.

The most famous air/ship missiles are no doubt the Exocet of Falklands War fame and Persian Gulf (USS Stark hit) infamy, but the Harpoon is quite well-known as well.

I'll ignore the short-ranged or tiny missiles here (Sea Skua, Marte, Penguin) and focus on those that could be used to engage a fully operational anti-air warfare destroyer, for example. I also ignore the Swedish RBS-15 here, since Sweden isn't in NATO.

A couple more missiles were in use, but have become rather or entirely irrelevant by now (Kormoran, Sea Eagle).

Rafale with AM.39 Exocet

Spanish and Portuguese air forces use Harpoons and the German air force still uses Kormoran 2 (at most 140 in storage if at all). The French use the AM.39 Exocet on naval Rafales and land-based Mirage 2000 while the Greeks use AM.39 from Mirage 2000s. NSM isn't in use as air/ship munition yet.

I doubt the Portuguese ever purchased significant numbers of AGM-84 Harpoons, the Spanish seem to have purchased only 20 AGM-84D Harpoon ever and about the AM.39 Exocet I only found out that the total production run was about 1,100 (it was quite an export success outside of NATO) and a mere 34 were ordered in the 1992-2014 time frame at all. The missiles in stock are thus technologically old and may be in poor shape due to very long storage.

In short; I didn't find out even only the approximate quantity of operational air-to-ship missiles in European NATO (it's certainly three digits), but I strongly doubt that saturation attacks with hundreds of missiles are feasible with only European air power at all.

This is in part justified by confidence in submarines and in part by the pitiful state of the Russian Navy. Several fairly modern types of air/surface cruise missiles may be relevant for anti-ship strike even though they were primarily developed with structures on land.

- - - - -

We will likely see JSM and LRASM to become important future air/ship missiles in Europe, and the French may go on with their Exocet Block 3, though maybe mostly so in export markets beyond NATO.

The MBDA Marte ERP missile (range now supposed to be over 100 km) is
meant for the Typhoon and may be introduced into the Italian Typhoons,
though the parallel operation of F-35 versions (which will likely have
JSM integrated without extra expenses for Italy) puts this in jeopardy.

The once promising French-German ANS project was cancelled long, long ago and France doesn't seem to want to develop a conventional air/ship version of its ASMPA missile (it didn't do so with ASMP either). Many current anti-ship missile projects are rather anti-boat missile projects with missile weights of less than Exocet's warhead mass. MBDA's Perseus looks stillborn to me though the submunitions could be interesting for radar countermeasures.

This means there's no supersonic anti-ship missile in European service and there will likely be no such thing in service before 2025 unless one counts anti-radar missiles (particularly the new AGM-88E).

An all-subsonic threat makes it easier to devise defensive systems than a mixed subsonic/supersonic threat would, of course. The current emphasis appears to be on surprise attacks using radar stealth (though still often with emitting radar seeker) to detect, identify and lock onto the target before countermeasures were deployed. Then the missile needs to penetrate the soft and hard kill countermeasures somehow to score the hit. Supersonic missiles could also strive for surprise (supersonic seaskimming is possible) and are meant to overcome defences by leaving them too few seconds for an effective reaction.

A quick fix for the lack of supersonic air/ship missiles would be to introduce the rather heavy Taiwanese Hsiung Feng III in an air launch-qualified version (or "to import the technology" to quickly build a clone), but Taiwan would no doubt expect arms deliveries in return. I suppose only those countries who wouldn't jeopardise much trade with the PR China would consider this worthwhile.

European NATO members COULD build up an inventory of 2,000 capable air/ship missiles at expenses of less than € 3 bn within a few years IF there was a need for it. The missiles are expensive per copy, but the expenses would still be rounding errors in the overall picture of European NATO's multi-year military spending.

The current lack of such munitions means that the ability to dominate the seas from the air is rather limited, but the security situation seems to excuse this.

P.S.: I link to Wikipedia for convenience, but I have become rather estranged by it. I once had a heated dispute when I tried to remove counterfactual nonsense and was overruled by a majority who preferred to maintain a sympathetic myth even though the primary source that was found proved them wrong. Thus my Wikipedia links mean "I am writing about this thing/event", they are no a recommendations of any kind.